Ali Rıza Taşkale

Looks very interesting. Reminds me of Japhy Wilson's work on apocalypticism

‘Dark, like our future’: Iranians describe scenes of catastrophe after Tehran’s oil depots bombed Residents report terror of smoke-filled city, from potentially toxic rain, air and water to food scarcity and difficulty of escape

“Even masks are becoming difficult to find. This is a huge mistake. I ask those who have the ability, especially foreign media, to reflect on this situation. What are people supposed to do under these conditions? This is truly a crime against humanity.”

Same episode: Fisher said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Industry’s update: we don’t even need to imagine it. We choose it. “We choose to be ruined rather than change”.

Same episode: a Labour MP names neoliberalism’s “decades-long project of gutting the moral architecture of how we govern”, while Yasmin tells a tech-accelerationist to save the democracy-abolishing talk for Silicon Valley. A drama doing the work political science forgot to do.

Industry S4E8 is a blast! It even puts a great critique of neoliberal governance in the mouth of a fictional Labour MP mid-breakdown: “My job to be seduced and falsely loved so neoliberalism can gut the moral architecture of how we govern”. The scapegoat speaks. The system stays intact.

As I said, this is the first academic output of a larger project on materialized science fiction - with more to come: upcoming talks, pieces in public outlets, and further research on how speculative narratives are becoming infrastructure for corporate power and governance. Watch this space.

Through Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash & Dave Eggers’s The Circle, the article shows how critical dystopias are repurposed to do the opposite of what they intended. SF is no longer just inspiration - it operates as a blueprint for governance where power is embedded in code, capital, & infrastructure.

Tech elites doesn’t just draw from science fiction - figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen turn speculative imaginaries into governance strategies, naturalizing privatized sovereignty, algorithmic control, and oligarchic power through narratives of innovation and inevitability.

New article in Global Studies Quarterly - the first academic piece developing my “materialized science fiction” framework. Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen don’t just love SF; they’re turning it into a blueprint for sovereignty. Fully open access: academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...

Short thread ↓

New Paper out with @financeandspace.bsky.social (open access!) about attempts to make voluntary carbon markets 'liquid' via legal standardization, and a source of climate finance for the Global South. Plenty of strange things happening in the process. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Reform UK receives another big donation from crypto investor Christopher Harborne gave the party £3mn in November, on top of £9mn donated in August

Reform UK receives another big donation from crypto investor ft.trib.al/eXBmrkF

I'll be in the UK again, this time for a talk on materialized science fiction at the Centre for Business and Society, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge on 25 March! Event details here: lnkd.in/eQ8ztGCG
Looking forward to connecting with people in the Cambridge area including @iliasalami.bsky.social

Have you read Anton Jäger’s new book Hyperpolitics yet? If so, I’d be curious to hear your take. I did, and couldn’t resist writing a review - especially since it sparked some thoughts about post-politics.
It’s forthcoming in European Journal of Social Theory.

Necropolitics is now Monetised. Necropolitics is the use of power to decide who lives and dies. Insiders can now profit by trading on markets for who will be bombed and assassinated. We live in the time of monsters.

When a prediction market contract on "will Khamenei remain supreme leader" doesn't exclude death - it has quietly become a market for assassination risk. Finance has always priced life and death. But usually not this literally, this transparently, and with this little accountability.

Polymarket Iran Bets Hit $529 Million as New Wallets Draw Notice As US and Israeli bombs fell on Iran this weekend, bettors on Polymarket — where $529 million was traded on contracts tied to the timing of the strikes — were cashing in. Almost immediately, blockchai...

Prediction markets don't aggregate knowledge; they monetize. When you can profit from a military strike before it happens, speculation & intelligence become the same thing. $529M traded on Polymarket's Iran contracts. Some wallets opened days before the bombs fell. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Currently reviewing three articles on tech oligarchy. Fascinating how the term has moved from rhetorical flourish to core analytic category in political economy and STS.

Every few years, American finance realizes this one thing called speculation (investment) and this other thing called speculation (fiction) are the same thing. AND THEY FREAK THE FUCK OUT. And then forget again almost instantaneously.

aeon.co/essays/the-f...

This speech is terrifying: Altman renders the human body as a training run - 20 years, caloric input, cognitive output. The human is retroactively recast as a less efficient, nonscalable AI. This is biopolitics at its purest: subordinating the form of life to the function of intelligence production.

Saturday diagnosis: we escaped post-politics only to drown in its louder, angrier ghost.

Nick Land once raved about machines replacing humanity in the ’90s. Now Silicon Valley’s AI elite are quoting him in mansions overlooking the Pacific. When the people building superintelligence believe humans are obsolete, the future stops being science fiction and starts being policy.

I’ve just submitted my 10-page referee report to a 15-page article, which somehow makes it across all 15 pages without ever pausing to offer a precise page reference. Turns out I had more pages in me than the author had page numbers!

Melinda Cooper écrit toujours des choses extrêmement justes, je m’en vais de ce pas lire ce texte 🤓

To me, Melinda Cooper is basically arguing that Silicon Valley has turned a specific narrative template - the primal father founding a new race - into real social and economic structures, and that’s what makes the piece so provocative and fascinating.

Epstein Family Values • EQUATOR The billionaire patriarchs of the American far-right want to rule an economy of masters and servants

Fascinating piece by Melinda Cooper connecting Silicon Valley pronatalism, the household economies of billionaire compounds, and the Epstein case to argue for an emerging “master-and-servant” political economy. www.equator.org/articles/eps...

Can't wait to read!

Karp skyder med skarpt - Føljeton

I got interviewed by Danish daily Føljeton about Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s efforts to build a nationalist and militarized tech oligarchy, and the implications of that for democracy and accountability. I’m glad this discussion has now entered the Danish territory. foljeton.dk/post/karp-sk...

Check out my essay "Welcome to the age of Longevity Capitalism" now open access in @finandsoc.bsky.social

Thank you @aminsamman.bsky.social for endorsing the project, and to @jvtk.bsky.social for our great conversation on these ideas.

Picture credit to Harald Bergauer visual interpretation

Karp skyder med skarpt - Føljeton

I got interviewed by Danish daily Føljeton about Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s efforts to build a nationalist and militarized tech oligarchy, and the implications of that for democracy and accountability. I’m glad this discussion has now entered the Danish territory. foljeton.dk/post/karp-sk...

MUSKISM in Berlin!

with @quinnslobodian.com and @bentarnoff.com

Tues, March 10, 14:00, HU Berlin

socializationproject.de/event/muskis...